Who Is The Times Square Car Bomb Suspect?
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[KLP Note: It will be interesting to see the timeline on how this guy became a citizen of the US just last year (April 2009)….
How long had he been on the list to become a citizen?
Is his family in Pakistan or here in the US?
When did he marry?
What does he do for a living in the US?
Who were the other two arrested with him on the plane last night? ]
May 4, 2010 10:45 am US/Eastern
Who Is The Times Square Car Bomb Suspect?
Former Neighbors Of Accused Times Square Bomber The Married Father Of Two Kept To Himself, Claimed To Work On Wall Street
Faisal Shahzad gave the impression of a quiet family man, raising two small children with his wife in Shelton, Conn. and telling neighbors he worked on Wall Street.
Now the Pakistani-American is accused of trying to detonate a homemade car bomb in New York City's bustling Times Square.
Shahzad was on board a Dubai-bound flight at Kennedy Airport when FBI agents and New York Police Department detectives took him into custody late Monday, law enforcement officials said. One official said he claimed to have acted alone.
Despite becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen on April 17, 2009, Shahzad spent much of the past year outside of the country, mostly in Pakistan where his wife, Huma Mian, is currently living. Details of his activities abroad remain unclear, but a picture of his life in American began to emerge Tuesday.
Shahzad, along with his wife and children, a boy and a girl, lived for about three years in a two-story Colonial-style three-bedroom home in Shelton, Conn., former neighbors said.
Neighbors offered diverging descriptions of Shahzad but agreed that he kept to himself. One, Brenda Thurman, said Shahzad had told her husband he worked on Wall Street, while another neighbor, Audrey Sokol, said she thought he worked in nearby Norwalk.
"He was a little bit strange," she said. "He didn't like to come out during the day."
Sokol, a teacher who lives next door to Shahzad's old house, said that he would wave and say hello and that he seemed normal to her.
Shahzad and his family previously lived in Bridgeport, Conn., in a mixed-race, working-class neighborhood of multi-family homes. Authorities removed filled plastic bags from that house overnight and a bomb squad came and went without entering as local police and FBI agents gathered in the cordoned-off street.
He became a citizen in Hartford, Conn., and passed all the criminal and national security background checks required for citizenship, officials said.
The officials familiar with the inquiry say investigators plan to go through his citizenship application line by line to see if he lied about anything.
Court records show that the suspect in the failed Times Square bombing defaulted on a $200,000 mortgage on his Connecticut home and that the property is in foreclosure.
Records obtained by The Associated Press show that Chase Home Finance LLC sued Shahzad in September to foreclose on the home in Shelton.
The foreclosure records show Shahzad took out the mortgage on the property in 2004, and he co-owned the home with a woman named Huma Mian. The foreclosure case is pending in Milford Superior Court.
A message was left Tuesday with an attorney for Chase's law firm. The records show Shahzad and Mian didn't have lawyers for the case.
On June 2, 2009, Shahzad departed the U.S. for Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. In July, he reportedly traveled to Pakistan and is believed to have visited Peshawar, a city known as a gateway to the militant-occupied tribal regions of the country, according to MSNBC.
Shahzad last entered the U.S. on Feb. 3, 2010 after a five-month visit to Pakistan. According to authorities he purchased the Nissan Pathfinder used in the attempted bombing three weeks ago for $1,300. He responded to a Craigslist ad and paid for the vehicle in cash.
He is expected to appear in court later Tuesday.
More than a dozen people with American citizenship or residency, like Shahzad, have been accused in the past two years of supporting or carrying out terrorism attempts on U.S. soil, cases that illustrate the threat of violent extremism from within the U.S.
Among them are Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, a U.S.-born Army psychiatrist of Palestinian descent, charged with fatally shooting 13 people last year at Fort Hood, Texas; Najibullah Zazi, a Denver-area airport shuttle driver who pleaded guilty in February in a plot to bomb New York subways; and a Pennsylvania woman who authorities say became radicalized online as "Jihad Jane" and plotted to kill a Swedish artist whose work offended Muslims.
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